The military adviser left out in the cold

Chief foreign correspondent

"I just want to know the facts, and then I'll shut up" ... Gwenyth Todd.

The lost pages of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 have turned up: they are the real-life career notes of Gwenyth Todd, a dashing former American diplomat and adviser to the US Navy in the Middle East.

''Bright, brash, tall and sexy,'' is The Washington Post's thumbnail for a 47-year-old who strode the corridors of the Pentagon and the White House with brains, ease and ambition.

But these days she hunkers in Canberra, where her daily ruminations on the implosion of a stellar career are a good fit for the Australian tweaking of Heller's great line - ''just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean that the bastards are not out to get you''.

The Middle East is a roller-coaster. Individuals and governments intervene at their peril and Todd, pictured, was right up there, reporting for duty in 2005 as a contract political adviser to the navy's top brass at the American bunker in Bahrain.

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Writing here requires brevity. But the essentials of a drama-laden, 5000-plus word expose´ in the Post in August are these: in 2007, as punishment for having Washington intervene to thwart a maverick admiral's plot to goad Iran into a possible confrontation at sea, her access to the base was bizarrely terminated after she had been dispatched on a high-risk, night-time mission away from the base.

''Freaking out'', Todd fled to Australia and subsequently married the man who came up with the idea to do so - Charles Huxtable, a Royal Australian Navy captain, then serving as liaison with the US Fifth Fleet. She had had a previous relationship - ''tempestuous'' by her account - with the colourful Robert Cabelly, an adviser on Africa to successive US administrations who, in the late 1990s, was cashing in as a lobbyist and, unknown to Todd, taking coin from some of the continent's less savoury types.

She figured Cabelly was an unofficial back channel for the administration, to the likes of Sudan's Omar Hassan al-Bashir, then on Washington's terrorism blacklist. However, Cabelly was under FBI investigation over sanction-busting deals for oil and aircraft. And for a time, Todd was cited as an unindicted co-conspirator because of a misunderstanding about money that she had borrowed briefly, but had returned to Cabelly.

Washington is stonewalling on Todd's demands for an explanation for her termination - and this is the context in which strange things happen.

Things such as the Inspector Clouseau moment last year, when the FBI came knocking on her door in Canberra and the agent fumbled his cover story for a crude effort to lure her to the US embassy and perhaps beyond any protection she would have had under Australian law.

Like when days after publication of the Post piece, the US Navy commander who had severed Todd's access to the Bahrain base bobbed up at a conference in Australia, where a friend of Todd's husband had overheard the American officer asking a senior Australian navy man if he had read the piece and was he familiar with the Todd scandal?

Too much of a coincidence? By Todd's reckoning the visiting officer had to have concluded that Todd would be arrested or killed while outside the wire. And now here she was, going halfway around the world to absolve the maverick admiral of any involvement in cutting Todd adrift, the senior Australian officer who told Todd of his encounter said.

The reaction to The Washington Post report was huge. Old administration voices could be detected amid more than 3000 online comments, some seeming to sail perilously close to, if not into Valerie Plame waters. Plame was a CIA operative whose cover was blown by Bush administration officials as payback for her diplomat husband's debunking of the case for war against Saddam Hussein in 2003.

But Todd was not without stout defenders. ''Sagely'' pounces when the apparently too-well-informed ''Malcolm Young'' argues that Todd's contract was for ''force protection'' in Bahrain and that her ''contract was terminated after the FBI disclosed to the Navy that she was part of [the Cabelly] criminal investigation''.

''Sagely'' tartly demands to know how ''Malcolm Young'' knew so much that had not been in the Post article. He parries, claiming to have done a Google search and to have deduced the circumstances of her being ''let go'' from the available facts.

Claiming ''to know a few of the navy officers involved'', ''Sagely'' mounts a spirited defence of Todd, tracing a career arc spanning the globe and a moment in recent history that leaves us gasping:

''Ms Todd is indeed a patriot. She has stood up for justice for the families of the Lockerbie disaster and spoke against government officials who wanted to discredit the American families, so that they could lift sanctions against Libya.

''[She] was instrumental in imposing the no-fly zone against Saddam Hussein, so that the Kurdish people would not … face genocide. She was instrumental in imposing sanctions against Iraq.

''She has openly spoken out against the 'friendly fire' assertion on the death of Pat Tillman [in Afghanistan] - he was shot at close range in the head, which is not friendly fire. She helped expose a senior American Israel Public Affairs Committee spy, by wearing a wiretap for the FBI. And she spoke out against the [maverick admiral's plot] to create havoc … and possibly a war with Iran.''

Todd thinks it's wise that she stays away from the US. She consults her lawyers outside the US and she sees her parents either in Australia or in Canada. The daughter she had with Cabelly - who omitted to tell her he was married and would not divorce his wife - is with her in Canberra.

''I just want to know the facts, and then I'll shut up,'' Todd says of her determination to extract an explanation from Washington. Seems reasonable, but what would Heller make of it all?